Kidnapping Victim Escapes From Car Trunk Using Her Insulin Pump

A nursing student managed to escape her kidnapper by unlocking the car truck she had been trapped in—with clever use of her insulin pump—and jumping out of the moving vehicle, she revealed on the Today show yesterday.

Brittany Diggs, 25, was allegedly approached by a man holding a gun and demanding money not far from her Alabama apartment last week. She told him that she didn’t have any money—at which point the man forced her into the driver’s seat of her Nissan Altima and told her to drive to a separate part of town.

“He was like, ‘Well, since you don’t have any money, you’re going to help me get money,’” she said on Today.

The man tried to rob two separate couples with Diggs in the driver’s seat—and then demanded she open the trunk and climb inside. He also ordered her to give him her ATM card and PIN numbers, Diggs said.

The man drove to several ATM locations with Diggs in the trunk. When the man stopped at a gas station, Diggs remembered seeing a Facebook video showing how to open a car trunk from a latch on the inside.

She used the light on her insulin pump to find the latch, and then waited for the man to get back into the driver’s seat of the car. He began pulling out fast as Diggs pulled on the latch, tumbling out of the quickly moving car and running into the gas station to hide as the owner called police.

The suspect is still at large, and Diggs said she’s terrified to return to her apartment.

“I try to put it in the back of my head so I can just get through the day, but that was the scariest thing I ever had to deal with,” said Diggs. A friend of Diggs started a GoFundMe page to assist her in paying for hospital fees, legal fees, and moving costs. “It was just a lot because I’m not from here and I don’t have a support system down here besides my roommate. I just felt like it was a lot.”